Get Ready for Black Friday with Load and Performance Testing

The shopping extravaganza from the US – Black Friday – has become one of the biggest shopping events of the year. Even though we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Europe and have no long weekend, we somehow still feel the urge to buy and buy and buy on Black Friday.

Since most Europeans have to work that day, we tend to do this shopping online, and e-tailers surely aren’t angry about the traffic spike on their websites. However, in order to utilise the full purchasing potential of Black Friday, they need to provide a top-notch shopping experience for all their eager customers. And that experience isn’t only about functionality and usability. We feel that this is our cue to talk about something equally important, namely load and performance testing.

Load Testing and Its Profitable Outcomes

If you look at the numbers, a well-performing and, specifically, a fast-loading online shop effectively means higher revenue. When we look at the past year, overall sales in Germany increased by 202% on Black Friday alone. The traffic on German online shops nearly doubled compared to the usual average. This means that not only are there more visitors, but they’re also willing to spend more money than usual. For 2019, Statista published a study that shows that 38% of the people asked plan to spend 101-300€ on Black Friday. You don’t want upset customers in general, but what you really don’t want is upset customers on Black Friday!

When it comes to load times, according to a study on BigCommerce, a mere 1 second delay in page load time can lead to a conversion decrease of 7% because people just don’t want to wait. Especially the ones shopping on their mobile device (read our article about Mobile Commerce and E-commerce Testing here).

You can do the maths for your business by yourself: take your average conversion rate, multiply it by 1,07 and double it because of the higher level of traffic. That’s how much you could theoretically increase your conversion rate on Black Friday – if your load time speeds up by 1 second. As you can see, stress-testing your website with a load testing process is a hidden gem for CRO.

What is Load Testing?

Even when a website has been successfully tested by a development team in a lab environment for load and reaction times, various issues still remain unaddressed. Questions might include: How does the system perform under real-life conditions or when using different network providers? What happens if thousands of users want to access the software simultaneously?

With the help of our Crowd, we can tackle these kinds of issues. In a load and performance test, the user load can be generated by the Crowd, meaning by real users, using tools such as JMeter, from a multitude of different network providers and different countries. This way real-life conditions can be achieved, and they’re accompanied by direct consumer feedback on performance through questionnaires and videos.

With our client Landal, we did exactly this – a website speed test – in order to optimise the load, performance, and stability of their webshop: the necessary load was created by the Crowd, by running test scripts provided by us at a given time and date from various networks and countries. At the same time, they performed ten previously defined test cases on a 4G connection with iOS and Android smartphones, and with differing network providers. The testers also answered qualitative and quantitative questions. These results were then used together with a KPI analysis, to better prepare the system for the next big shopping spree. If you’d like to know more, you can read about it in our Landal Case Study.

Webinar: Load and Performance Testing

Last year, we offered a webinar covering the topic of website load tests, which is still available on YouTube and provides a comprehensive overview of various types of load and performance tests. The webinar is suitable for both newcomers and experts and contains the setup of load and performance tests, a presentation of sample projects, and some of the lessons we learned.

Experts for Load and Performance Tests

Get ready for Black Friday with Testbirds and exploit the shopping feast on the 29th with a better performing and more stable online appearance. If you’re interested in finding out more, get in touch with our experts in load and performance tests and just hit us up with a message. We’re happy to help!

Until then, happy Black Friday preparations!